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The Beginner's Guide to Evernote

If you've felt the crush of information overload and wanted to get organized, it's time to check out Evernote. The cloud-stored notebook has a strong presence as both a computer and mobile app, along with a web platform, so you can access one organized Evernote account from all kinds of places.

Evernote just celebrated its five-year anniversary, too. It's a testament that neither the service nor your data are going anywhere.

Using Evernote can be intimidating if you're just starting out, though, so Mashable created this guide to getting the most out of cloud note-taking.

Setting Up

Evernote is available for free for Windows, Mac, iOS and Android, and Windows Phone. To get the most value from the service, download Evernote on each of your devices and set up an account. The whole process should take about five minutes, and only requires an email address.

With your free account, you are permitted 60 MB of uploads per month, with each month rolling over on the 13th. This will generally cover everything you need. Note: Your old notes won't count against that storage limit, once you've reached rollover each month.

Notes and Notebooks

Once you've created your account, Evernote will set up a notebook with your username. This notebook contains all the "Notes" you'll be creating.

To create a Note, just click "New Note" on Evernote's top taskbar. Think of a Note as a robust text document. You can simply type into your notebook to add information, but you can also modify font, size, style and color, just like any word processing tool.

Notes have a few extra features, as well. Add working checklists, for example. Or attach a relevant URL to your Note, if you want to associate it with a webpage without cluttering your text body with links.

You can also tag your notes with several different searchable keywords. If you're working on big project with lots of smaller pieces, create a "project" tag — you can pull up that tag later through search, or by clicking on your most-used tags. Some desktop versions of the app also allow you to drag tags into the top navigation bar, saving you a step.

All your Notes exist in your default notebook, but making new notebooks is easy. It's a good way to organize all your Notes into broader topics, like school or work.

Additional Tools

Evernote developed a suite of other tools that tie in with its organization system. Those interactions end up back in your notebooks, too.

One of the most useful tools is the Evernote Web Clipper, a browser extension to save URLs, pictures and text from web pages for later browsing. If you're reading an article with interesting content, select the whole page, or just a portion of the text — that selection will save as a new Note in Evernote.

You can select the destination notebook from Web Clipper, along with any tags you want to include. The Note will then save to the desired notebook with the URL attached, so you can always revisit the page if needed. Use this versatile feature to save any kind of content, from recipes to crafts to articles you want to peruse later.

If you're looking for more apps, browse Evernote's "Trunk." It features hundreds of apps that use the Evernote API to access your notebook and ultimately enhance your Evernote experience.

Evernote On the Go

Evernote gets its power from the cloud, so it becomes even more useful when you install it across all of your mobile devices. The Evernote mobile app has a unique suite of options.

Along with the ability to view all your Notes and notebooks on the app, you can tag content with the help of your phone or tablet camera. Take one or several photos and add them to a Note with the appropriate tags. Those Notes then show up with image previews, in both the mobile and desktop versions of Evernote. Evernote can even convert the text in your photos into searchable text.

To create a photo Note, either click the camera icon at the top of the app or create a new Note and click the camera icon at the top. Inside the Note is the only place you can add photos already stored in your Camera Roll. Once you've saved the Note, the photos show up in the thumbnails (see below).

Use this for copying information from a book or magazine into Evernote, or even turning a stack of business cards into a virtual Rolodex.

Evernote's mobile app also features a reminder function, so you can set Note alerts for a certain day or time, which either remind you via email or push notification. The below video shows how to set up reminders.

Notes created via mobile app are also tagged by location, so you can recall where you wrote those two hasty sentences in a moment of inspiration.

Everything on your phone or computer syncs automatically, though it's worth hitting the sync button on the Evernote dashboard from time to time to ensure your information saves to the cloud, especially if you're about to close the app or leave your computer.

While these tips are enough to get you started, Evernote is such an open-ended tool that you'll probably devise plenty of ways to get organized and stay productive. Do you have any cool Evernote hacks or tips to share? Please do so in the comments below.

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